Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Katerina Pantoula (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Morphological salience in gender and case comprehension in L1-Greek heritage children

Abstract: Recent crosslinguistic psycholinguistic research has shown the facilitative role of morphosyntactic cues on the acquisition of grammatical gender and case in heritage bilingual children (Chondrogianni & Schwartz, 2020; Rodina et al., 2020). At the same time, the heritage speakers’ grammar system has been found to exhibit difficulties in computing ambiguities (Polinsky & Scontras, 2020). Greek gender- and case-marking inflectional morphology is characterised by paradigmatic syncretism (Marinis, 2003). In this talk, we tap into the L1-like or L2-like the nature of interpretive strategies involved in the computation of Greek gender-marking and case-marking suffixation. We present data from L1-Greek heritage bilingual children, their monolingual peers, and adult baseline grammar controls from two experiments on the comprehension of gender and case in Greek. The results of the gender prediction picture-selection task revealed variable performance across genders and those of the case comprehension truth-value judgement task a case-marking cue position effect. The results suggest that the acquisition of nominal inflectional morphology is a vulnerable domain in the grammar system of heritage bilingual children. The findings lend evidence to support similarities of the heritage bilingual grammar with the L1-baseline grammar. Evidence in favour of the predictive value of child-internal and child-external factors were also attested.